Encouragement of savings and building up the financial reserves of
farmers will strengthen their self-financing capacity. Complementary
bank credit may be useful in particular to finance increased working
capital and new capital investments, while leasing financial arrangements may be attractive for the acquisition of farm machinery and similar ‘lumpy’ investments.
PROFITABILITY AND RISKS OF ON -FARM INVESTMENTS
The major factors that affect banker and farmer behaviour in on-farm
lending operations are the expected profitability of and the risks related
to on-farm investments. Risks can be of different natures and include
those associated with the impact of unfavourable weather on production, (drought, hail, floods), diseases or pest damage, economic risks due
to uncertain markets and prices, productivity and management risks
related to the adoption of new technologies, and credit risks as they
depend on the utilization of financial resources and the repayment
behaviour of farmer clients. The relative importance of these different
risks will vary by region and by type of farmer. For example, marketing
risks are greater for mono-crop cultures in developing countries, which
depend on volatile world markets. Eastern European transition
economies which go through a major re-structuring from a centrally-planned to a market economy, need, in particular, training and technical
assistance in business management in order to reduce both market and
credit risks. These risks will also decrease as the level of education of
farmers and the availability of information on markets, prices and loan
repayment behaviour increase. In some cases, especially for relatively
high technology farming that involves significant investments, agricultural insurance may be useful as a risk management tool. But it should
be used only for specific crop/livestock enterprises and for clearly
defined risks (Roberts and Dick, 1991).
Risks are also related to the duration of loans, since the uncertainty of
farm incomes and the probability of losses increases over longer time
horizons. Thus, given the average short maturity of loanable resources
in deposit-taking financial institutions, and considering the time horizon
of agricultural seasonal and investment loans, commercial bankers are